drupalcon09

You know, if you're not going to pay attention in the session, maybe you shouldn't have come.

I guess Drupal conferences are where Northrop Grumman employees go to relax.

As has become our daily ritual, a daily ritual of one day, I might add, Jessica and I met up at the hotel to head out for dinner somewhere in DC. Jess hasn't really explored the city yet, and, well, being my first time, neither had I. We hemmed and hawwed, trying to figure out where to go, with my suggesting the boring (do what we did last night), when she suggested CoCo Sala.

CoCo Sala is a restaurant bar with a chocolate theme. The Yelp reviews were all positive for the food, all with caveat that the noise in the place was, well, uncontrollable. The portions were listed as small, but I'd been overeating a lot on this trip so the smaller portions didn't really bother me, I stopped listening when Jessica said "chocolate."

So, off we went, on the Metro. Jessica stays at hotels close enough to her work that she doesn't need to take the Metro, so my back and forth jaunts to the conference made me the "experienced" one on the Metro. Off we went, to a new station, one that dumped everyone heading into downtown to see the Capitals play. Quite the adventure, I'm not sure how we surived with the mass throngs of Captials fans.

Once we arrived, I pulled out my camera and started taking pictures of the area.

"You look like a tourist," Jessica commented.

I embraced my touristism (much to Jessica's embarrassment, I think), inflicting it on Jessica.

The restaurange was as advertised. LOUD. It was painfully loud.

Since it was so loud, when I sat down, I sat in the chair 90° from where Jessica was sitting in the booth, instead of opposite her. Knowing I don't do well in loud, sitting next to Jessica worked perfectly. We were able to talk over the loud noises, ooooohing and aaaaaahing over the various courses. The first course was AMAZING.

It went downhill from there.

The next tastiness of the next courses weren't as great as the first course. The chocolate souffle had cayenne in it, which wasn't exactly tasty to me. The third course had maybe one tasty item in it.

The kicker came, however, when the hostess came up and asked me to move away from my seat. She wanted me to move 90° so that I was sitting opposite Jessica. That way, she could seat another person in the space I vacated, turned the opposite way, sitting at the table next to us.

Now, I hate being unreasonable. I dislike the ugly American. I can't stand when I'm high maintenance. In this case, however, I believe my anger was justified.

I went from enjoying the conversation in the difficult environment to sitting in front of not so good food, unable to hear Jessica talk, much less yell at me from across the table, so that someone else could be seated at the next table.

I could not wait to leave the restaurant. The dinner was spoiled.

Jessica was much more level headed about the dinner disruption. She talked to the manager. I didn't hear any of the conversation, unfortunately (see the part above about the noise level). He didn't seem to be agreeing with anything she said, by his body language, yet our bill had a hefty 50% discount on it. She must have been somewhat persuasive.

Exiting the restaurant was a walk into relief. I wouldn't have thought that street level noises would be pleasant, but after the noise of the restaurant, phew!

We took the Metro back, which was yet another first for both of us: riding the Metro after 9PM.

And, hey, look! We made it back in one piece! We rock!

On the surface, Washington DC seems like every other metropolitan area: lots of buildings, lots of people, a reasonable public transit system, some culture, diverse ethic groups oddly segregated, lots of good restaurants.

The differences, however, are in the in the details, and ooo, boy, are they annoying.

Take the diffference between where bathroom orientations.

Here in D.C., perhaps all along the East Coast, I don't know, I haven't checked, the men's bathroom is on the right, and the women's is on the left.

Which is the COMPLETELY WRONG ORIENTATION.

Sure, the doors are marked with big Ms and big Ws. Doesn't help. I've walked into the men's bathroom not once but TWICE today alone.

The women's bathroom should be on the right and the men's on the left.

Everything here is automated, to my annoyance. As if touching a toliet handle, or soap dispenser, or water fountain is beneath the dignity of anyone who lives or visits Washington D.C.

As a result of this mis-configured automation, I've managed to flush the toliet an median of three times for every time my ass has actually touched the toliet seat. That median, however, does count as one all the times I leap off the seat to avoid being sprayed by the toliet that has decided to flush WHILE I'M STILL DOING MY BUSINESS.

The soap dispensers are fine, I can deal with them for the most part. I've finally figured out how to hold my hands when pulling them out of the automatically flowing water from the faucet, so that I don't manage ANOTHER spray of soap on my freshly rinsed hands (which of course, prompts ANOTHER rinsing - vicious cycle that).

The water fountain, oh, the water fountain! It turns on with sensors. Except that, if you don't know this, and push in on the sensors, which is the same as, oh, covering the two sensors and triggering the water. Unfortunately, it doesn't turn OFF until you walk backward away from the sensor by three feet.

I figured I had broken the damn thing.

With a title like "Advanced Theming," a theming session is guaranteed to attract a whole lot of people into the room. When the outline of the session is posted online and includes such goodies as how to

# keep themes compact and easy to manage
# take advantage of Drupal 6's sub-theming features
# use the more flexible hooks available to modules to do theming
# use Zen and the Themer package to reduce amount of theming required
# take advantage of existing styles to solve common problems

the room will be PACKED.

Oh, and hey, it was.

The session had so much potential! It was a session I was REALLY interested in attending. There weren't many sessions I figured I'd learn from, this was one of them.

Until less than halfway through, I had to think, "Hello, Tim."